Categories

Categories

Search for:

Heartbreaking Story of the Red-Headed Baby

According to gossip, Redheaded Connie and Callie were reputed to have been left on their Pentecostal aunt’s doorstep at birth. This fascinating tidbit guaranteed my interest. I imagined them lying in a basket, long waist-length braids dangling from a basket, dusting the ground. They were high-school girls when I was in first grade, so I never gave them much thought beyond that.

Connie dropped our house for some forgotten reason, many years later with her young husband and a four-month-old baby girl. Connie and Jimmy had been fishing the day before with their baby. Apparently, they knew little about baby-care and they hadn’t protected the baby from the sun. The tiny infant was as red-headed as its young mother, and extremely sun-burned. Mother was terribly worried about the baby, insisting the young parents take her to the doctor. Since the baby didn’t act sick, nursed, and played happily, the inexperienced parents ignored my parents’ concerns and went happily on their way.

The next day at church, we learned the young couple had awakened to find their baby dead in her crib. Our small community mourned, especially my mother, feeling perhaps she could have done more to save to sweet baby. Of course, in the 1950s, this was not possible. The young couple soon divorced.

This is heartbreaking. In recent months there have been two news reports of infants dying in ovens. This gives me nightmares. Surely there were signs that the parents were unfit to be parents? Without becoming another Salem Witchhunt, we have an obligation to speak up when we see wrongs such as sun burned babies. It is such a fine line; these boundaries of ours. Recently, I sent an article to a very heavy smoking couple with an infant. The article talked about the large correlation of secondhand smoke and SIDS. It changed nothing, but I had to try. Poor innocent babies all over this world. God bless them.

A tender babe has no chance against mother nature, parents lives forever saddened by the loss. An unhappy ending but sometimes we have to put pen to paper and record. The infant is still being remembered today on this page. A lesson still being learned.

That is so sad. Our daughter and son-in-law, divorced soon after the death, due to SIDS, of our three-month-old grandson, Adam. This was one of the saddest days of our lives. I can’t pass by his picture to this day and not wonder what he would have become–had he lived.